What do French gendarmes, Andalucian school children, Wikipedia and San Francisco International airport have in common?

It is not the set up for a tortuous pun. Instead all of them are big users of the free Ubuntu operating system.

The French national police force runs its operations on the open source OS; computer systems supporting Spanish schools have their own version; the online encyclopaedia runs its hundreds of servers on Ubuntu and SFIA's internal computer system is based around it.
Ubuntu is based on Linux -- the open source operating system that is maintained, expanded and extended by legions of fans and professional programmers around the world. Thanks to their efforts Ubuntu has become the most popular of all the Linux distributions.

On 29 October, version 9.10 of Ubuntu is released. All versions of the operating system have an alternative alliterative appellation. Ubuntu 9.10 is known as Karmic Koala.

The launch comes in the wake of Microsoft's fanfare around Windows 7 -- the latest incarnation of its flagship operating system.

Factory mode

While Ubuntu's developer Canonical can not quite match the hoopla surrounding Windows 7 for its launch, the software competes where it matters, said Chris Kenyon, one of Canonical's OS evangelists.

"For the first time in 20 years you can buy Ubuntu pre-installed from more than one manufacturer," he said. "That's an extraordinary story."

4 thoughts on “Ubuntu readies the Karmic Koala”

I’m not impressed with 9.10 so far. I’ve spent hours trying to get wireless to work on my Dell mini 9, something that worked out of the box on 9.04. The netbook interface is one big regression, nothing of note added and several features removed.

For me, the Karmic Koala is the best Ubuntu version ever. Even when it was in Alpha stage, it worked almost flawlessly on my Acer Aspire One. And the desktop effects work smoother than on my “real” notebook.

“I’ve spent hours trying to get wireless to work on my Dell mini 9, something that worked out of the box on 9.04.” ?????

I’m not a techno-geek, but just a regular lawyer with low-level computer skills. Absolutely no problems for me with assistance from the on-line community. I have Karmic dual-booting with XP on my HP laptop and I also put it on a home desktop, even getting the drivers for a non-standard webcam running via synaptic so I can use Skype for Ubuntu.

Runs fast and smooth for me. I like it . . . no, I love it. Freedom from windoze.